1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a flying head slider which floats above a relatively movable recording medium, such as a magnetic disc device, with a minute gap left therebetween, which has an improved floating characteristic and suited for mass production.
2. Description of the Prior Art
An example of the conventional flying head slider for use with a magnetic disc apparatus is the so-called taper-flat type which has a pair of air-bearing rails provided on the opposite sides of the slider and each having a flat surface portion and an oblique surface portion on the air-inlet side of the slider, as disclosed in, for example, Japanese Pat. Publication No. 57-569 corresponding to U.S. Pat. No. 3,823,416 issued Jul. 9, 1974 to Michael Walter Warner. The pair of air-bearing rails define therebetween a bleed slot sufficiently deep enough not to provide any air-bearing function.
The prior art slider has been fabricated in such a manner that the bleed slot is mechanically ground by a slicer, for example, and the oblique surfaces are machined by, for example, a lapping machine. As such, the prior art sliders are each machined by two kinds of working methods and, thus, one unsatisfactory from the view point of productivity.
Recently, the distance over which the slider is required to float above a recording surface has been minimized due to the fact that the density of the recording system is highly increased. Accordingly, the deviation of the floating distances of sliders due to dimensional tolerances thereof must be of a controlled small value. In the case where machining, such as grinding, is employed to work flying sliders, however, it is difficult to control the dimensional tolerances on the order of microns. In addition, sliders are liable to be broken during the machining process.
As discussed above, the productivity and an increase in accuracy have not been, taken into account in the conventional method of manufacture of flying sliders.
In the prior art, moreover, no attention has been paid to the decrease in the deviation of the floating distances of flying sliders caused by the increase in the working accuracy as well as productivity, so that there have been problems with meeting the demands for the decrease in the floating distances of sliders and for the decrease in the sizes thereof. Also, the prior art has not considered reducing the friction caused between the polished recording surface of a recording medium. For this reason, the prior art had a problem that the floating characteristic was unsatisfactory.